Alan Riach opens the covers of the most wonderful time-bomb in our recent literary history. Better than care, is love, and better than face-to-face opposition is the deployment of subversively attractive mutual intimacies and recognitions of shared sexuality.

Or to be blunt, our greatest weapons are laughter and sex.

SINCE well before the 18th century, prejudiced hostility has been a common response to Gaelic culture, encouraged by Anglocentric imperialism in linguistic, cultural, educational and political authority. I could go further. Counter-attacks are rare, entrenchment is familiar, all the defences are needed, and the abundant wealth of Gaelic poetic and cultural material has maintained itself against assault for centuries. The metaphor of warfare is precise. Annihilation is the purpose of the bigger bullying power, survival is the determinant virtue of the attacked.

But outright confrontation itself is often best subverted, and there are at least two major tactical ways to bring about that subversion: laughter and sex. And often, the two go together. An Leabhar Liath / The Light Blue Book: 500 Years of Gaelic Love and Transgressive Verse, edited by Peter Mackay and Iain S Macpherson (Luath Press, 2016) is a compendium of works which characteristically demonstrate the exercise of lust with discretion, and exemplify physical appetite with discrimination, although sometimes it’s mainly just lust and appetite. Opportunities for bathos are everywhere. Celebration brings elation, but humour is nothing if not reductive so the genre itself – explicit verse – is intrinsically challenging the pieties of convention, the rules of law, the rites of any battlefield.

In Michael Long’s words, in The Unnatural Scene: A Study in Shakespearean Tragedy (1976), “When the Lords of Navarre vow [in Love’s Labours Lost], with ‘statutes’, ‘oaths’ and ‘strict observances’, to shut themselves off from life and wage their war against ‘the huge army of the world’s desires’, we sit back and wait for the ‘brave conquerors’ to be humbled and defeated.” Similarly, in Compton Mackenzie’s Whisky Galore (1947), when Captain Waggett decides that the islanders of Little Todday have no right to the 50,000 cases of shipwrecked whisky, we know that the natural virtues belonging to those who understand how to make best use of the treasures of life will prevail over the assertions of rectitude and power, and we relax into the arch deliberations of Mackenzie’s prose, as it explores the conundrum of the conflict that yields comedy as surely as it otherwise might bring about tragedy.

In The Light Blue Book, we dive straight into the world of Gaelic permissiveness without the Captain Waggetts of the world looking over our shoulders. And it’s a revelation of delights. The book breaks new ground. No anthology has so effortlessly swept away the prejudiced hostilities so commonplace in clichés about Gaelic poetry. Here is neither gloom nor lament, cleared landscapes and misery, but rather a plenitude of people in all sorts of relationships, close and conflicted, tender and vigorous, ironic or direct and sincere. There are plenty of wild mountains and rushing torrents but they’re mainly metaphorical.

READ MORE: Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair: a great Scot, too aft forgot

In their introduction, the editors modestly indicate the history of pious hypocrisy former pontiffs have exhibited in characterising “the Gael” as “no prude” so that there are “passages and poems we could well do without” and the greatest of all Gaelic poets, Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair / Alexander MacDonald, as one who “by some strange twist in one or two of his poems, deliberately aimed at being shocking”. Alasdair, our editors happily admit, “was avowedly, exuberantly, excessively rude, (porno)graphic and blue”, and the previous quotation from William Watson is not the only place where grim judgement is passed on the “‘twisted’ dirty-mindedness” of such poets. The Rev Dr Mackintosh MacKay, for example, hoped that the obscene work would be destroyed, “burned by the hand of the common executioner”. The wish to expunge, sanitise or otherwise suppress this component of Gaelic verse has a long history. But so does bawdry, as these 65 poems, songs and fragments from over 500 years, high and low, explicit and innuendo-rich, all testify.

Contemporary poets in solitary lyricism inhabit a clear but quietly suggestive idiom, as in Anne Frater’s “Streang” / “String”, where the metaphor of a thread reeling the poet in towards “someone else” provides an appropriate rejection of another:

Tagh thusa do shreang fhèinn

ach cha bhi mise

aig ceann seach ceann dheth.

You choose your string

but I won’t be

at either end of it.

Or consider Frater’s “Comhairle” / “Advice” which concludes with admirably robust assertiveness:

Na bu cho modhail

Mura h-eil thus gam iarraidh

’s gu h-àraid ma tha!

Don’t be so polite

if you don’t want me

and especially if you do!

In a five-line poem, Iain Crichton Smith looks out of his living room window and sees a young woman walking down the street. He notices some yellow flowers, hears the water running in the pipes (is that a metaphor, or just the domestic plumbing?), notes her short skirt and ends with: “Tha d’ ùbhlan a’ gluasad a-null ’s a-nall.” / “Your apples move back and forth.” Are those apples in her shopping-basket? And even if they are, aren’t they just soundlessly sweet and suggestive? This is neither salacious drooling nor stupid self-denial. Frater gives you self-determination, Crichton Smith a perfect catch of the male gaze, respectful, distanced, yet at the same time acknowledging what natural lust still dwells within.

The introduction highlights the ambiguities of such terms as “obscene” and “pornographic” or “taboo”. In the historical context of hostility to Gaelic generally, suppression of the written exploration of sexuality is likewise an enactment of imperial power. Language, clothing, forms of social behaviour and interpersonal acceptance of what’s healthy and good are all the targets of a culture out to control. And a culture out to control is a culture out of control. The trust we all need in what is the intuitive good, the sense of human value that comes through, is always under attack from the forces of control. To ensure freedom, you need regulation – that’s true – but what sort of regulation would burn poems, ban touching, legitimise torture, ratify the administration of demonstrable expressive lyricism?

The questions become pressing and immediate when the poems deal with subjects “highly offensive to a modern reader”, and to their credit, the editors face this squarely. The treatment of rape in George Mackenzie’s “An Obair Nogha” or the anonymous “Eachainn an Slaoghtear” is a case in point. “To omit such material on the grounds of contemporary mores would … present a skewed and dishonest version of earlier attitudes to sex and love (though it doesn’t stop us condemning the attitudes expressed).” That’s an essential responsibility of any good editor: represent the era the work is drawn from accurately; don’t try to erase it from history, but approach it with the understanding we have now. This demands both the historian’s humility and the courage of our living sensibility. And that also means sensual engagement, and an honest acknowledgement of it, especially where poems are clearly intended to shock and cause offence. And poems that describe blood-drinking, eating sheep’s testicles, the castration of Mussolini, and the one in which a woman celebrates the survival of her beloved even though he has stolen her cattle, burnt her crops, killed her father and brothers and husband – are indeed shocking. They are, however, poems – intended to be read (or sometimes, sung), so that what they depict can be considered by the mind. And that makes a difference.

However, most of the poems are lovingly and vigorously erotic and the pleasures are attractive rather than appalling. When an aristocratic lady joyfully sings praises of the quality in action of the penis of her priest, the satiric subversion of the rectitude of church and court is happily contagious. And how many poems there are by women, encouraged through the waulking songs, developed in a context where, in Anne Lorne Gillies’s (below) words, women could “bitch, giggle and lose their inhibitions, retell old legends and new gossip; lament their heroes or their husbands, their love affairs or lack of them”. From such work-songs emerged much “feisty, often sexually explicit verse”.

The National:

The waulking songs, sheiling songs and the performances of the ceilidh all survive in the oral tradition into the present day and have their parallel tradition in the songs in Scots collected particularly by Robert Burns in The Jolly Beggars and The Merry Muses. Poems of desire, heterosexual and homosexual, “frank and unabashed” or “gently suggestive”, are abundant in The Light Blue Book. And the traditional association of the human body with the natural landscape shows itself in all the variations poetic ingenuity allows, so that “it is sometimes difficult to identify when the peaks, hillsides, hillocks, nooks, crofts, towers and stacs are simply geographical rather than bodily features.” What is commonly referred to as the Old Man of Storr, or Bodach an Stòrr, on the Isle of Skye, a conspicuous, solitary, upthrusting, angled pinnacle of rock, is perhaps more familiar in Gaelic as “Bod an Stòrr” (the Penis of Storr).

The book opens up a library of metaphors and similes awaiting inventive further deployment: musical instruments, harp strings, pipes and flutes, the bridge of a fiddle, the reed of a chanter, the hollow of a half-full bottle top, cornucopia of fruit, where touch and breath and tongue and eye might give and take impossible diversities, the reciprocal pleasures of contact.

Roaming through The Light Blue Book is an illumination not only of the possibilities of poetry but of the pleasures of sex, which require both command and surrender, mutuality and deep-sourced affirmation. This is a book that helps you confirm the rightness of the world, despite all things current to the contrary.